Dry River
by incandescens
Summary: Deserts and despair and the places where nothing lives and nothing waits. A continuing story, now concluded.
1. Chapter One

Chapter One   
This is the dry river.  
  
Here nothing changes except to die, and nothing dies to be born again, and nothing lives in the sere waste and the blowing sand. The wind comes from the east and goes to the west, but it brings no life from the east, and it takes only emptiness to the west. There are people who cover their eyes when that wind blows past, so as not to see the nothingness that flies upon it, and there are others who block their ears so that they will hear the drumming of their blood and the beating of their heart, rather than the dead silence which rides upon its wings.  
  
This is the dry river. If you follow it into the rocks, you will find the wellspring of the death which will not die.  
  
It flows through mortal lands when it is called, but ordinary words do not suffice, and the incantations of sorcerers fail to compel it. The dry river comes only to a very particular cry from the heart, when the mourner looks around her and says, _let me live my life in this despair_, and _let me have neither death nor birth, but let me simply exist_, and _give me dust to eat, let desert be my habitation, and let neither sun nor moon rise to watch me as I crawl upriver to the silence._  
  
Sometimes this may be a sorcerer, of course, or a priest, or a youkai, or simply a normal human being. It is rarely a child, for few children understand enough to make the full refusal of change and to wholly seek despair, and an understanding of the bargain is necessary.  
  
But when the dry river hears a call and bends its course to answer, it takes no heed as to who else may wander across its path. It is a generous host. It brooks no refusal.  
  
---  
  
Sanzou stared at the village which they were approaching, his eyes squinted against the dust on the wind. There was a bitter, persistent undertone to the air, and it seemed to carry grit and sand with an unnatural malice. Goku alternated complaints about it with pleas for food. It was almost a relief when Gojyo started to argue with him again, and he could shut the two up with applied _force majeure_.  
  
Hakkai was tactfully ignoring the whimpers from the back seat. "We don't actually need food," he stated, "but if we don't stop here, it'll be a while before we can pick up anything elsewhere."  
  
"We do need food!" Goku wailed. "I'm hungry!"  
  
"I need cigarettes," Gojyo put in helpfully. "Unless Sanzou-sama feels like donating some of his to mortify his flesh . . ."  
  
"Asshole," Sanzou muttered, weighing up the annoyance of a delay here against the persistent annoyance of complaints for the next couple of days. The delay won, barely. Part of the back of his mind tried to point out that any delays in small villages kept on inevitably leading to major complications and frequently to painful encounters with youkai or worse. He ignored it. "Fine. We stop here. But only for an hour. Food and shopping. That's all."  
  
"Maa, of course," Hakkai said cheerfully. "If you give me the credit card, I'll see to getting everything we need."  
  
Gojyo leaned over from the back seat, his crimson hair falling to lie on Sanzou's robe like a streak of blood. "You won't forget the cigarettes, Hakkai?"  
  
"Do I ever?"   
  
Gojyo grinned lazily, then recoiled with an oath as Sanzou brought the fan down on his head. "Yeah, yeah, and you'd better get some more beer for the monk here, looks like he's drying out . . ."  
  
As they approached the town more closely, Sanzou noted that the shutters were drawn against the heat of the day, and that only a few people moved slowly through the streets, their gait halting and their clothes drab. The wind had slowed now, and no longer plagued him with dust and sand. A thin flute was playing somewhere in the distance, the tune vaguely reminiscent of something he'd once heard at the temple where he was raised, though he couldn't remember precisely what.  
  
At least it wasn't raining.  
  
"This looks like the inn," Hakkai remarked, coming to a halt outside a battered building with a dust-spattered sign and a part-open front door. "If you all wait here, I'll go and do the shopping, and Goku can have some food." He smiled at the boy in the back seat.  
  
Sanzou stepped out of the jeep without replying. There was something in this place which suited his current mood; an arid bitterness of spirit, and a dry solitude which perfectly fitted his wish to be free of pestering arguments, annoying squabbles, and missions that tightened around him like fetters. Even Goku's solicitude and affection seemed to tire him today. Hopefully the stupid monkey would keep quiet while he ate.  
  
He was aware that Goku and Gojyo were following him inside, but he ignored them, striding over to a side table in the dimly-lit room and lighting another cigarette as he sat down. The place was empty apart from the innkeeper in the corner. Probably it was too early for the serious drinking to start, and too late for anyone to come here for lunch.  
  
It was astonishing how easy it was not to care.  
  
Goku was rattling off a list of dishes which he wanted. The innkeeper was old and dry, face drained of energy and seamed with wrinkles, his eyes sharp but distracted. Gojyo seemed, for a wonder, to have realized that Sanzou wanted privacy, and flopped down at another table, stretching out his legs and crossing his ankles. "And beer," he interrupted Goku's monologue. "Plenty of beer."  
  
Specks of dust descended in a long continuous spiral through a beam of light that came through a chink in the shuttered window. They seemed to fall forever, turning and spiralling in a slow unthinking cadence.  
  
Silence curled in the air and spread slowly through the room like a living thing.  
  
---  
  
And outside, a wind blew across the desert, and sifted dust and sand into a set of jeep tracks which vanished into nothingness.  
  
---

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	2. Chapter Two

Chapter Two   
  
Hakkai was used to having to purchase the supplies for the group. It would have been unkind and impolite to tell them that sometimes he welcomed the chance to be separate from them. It would have hurt Goku's feelings, and worried Gojyo. Gojyo grew worried so easily, after all.  
  
Dust danced in the wind as he made his way down the street.  
  
Gojyo grew worried so easily, and for such little cause. He didn't want the other man ever to have to understand that sudden abrupt moment of shock, loss -- no, not loss, he hadn't fully understood the true breadth of loss at that point, its depth and height and full dimensions, that great dark thing which swelled out behind the breastbone and left the heart drowning. That single heartbeat of _she's gone and I never knew_ as he had looked around the room and seen the upturned chair, the shattered table, the scattered set of scrolls which he had been ordering for his work with the children, the wrongness of it all. A heartbeat. The world changes.  
  
Of course he knew about Gojyo's past, he understood the other man's pain and grief, he sympathised with it -- but it wasn't the same. It could never be the same. In that respect, they were all alone.  
  
The shopkeeper's door stood closed, and the piles of vegetables and fruits in the crates outside her window were dried and wind-withered. Ants crawled over the melon in the far right hand corner, a trail of tiny dark insects without beginning or end.  
  
He knocked on the door.  
  
The woman who answered it was bent and wrinkled, as wizened as her goods, and a tangled mass of shawls slung around her shoulders made it hard to judge whether her stooped back was natural or deliberate. She looked up at him through thin grey lashes, then beckoned him in silently, and made no comment, spoke no word, as he picked through her meager stocks.   
  
There was dried fruit and bottled water and cans of beer, but no cigarettes. Gojyo would be annoyed. Hakkai tried to make pleasant conversation as he stacked fruit and cans on the counter, filling up the silence with a stream of questions and comments, but nothing broke her arid quiet. She took Sanzou's Three Aspects card from him and presented him with a bill, still unspeaking.  
  
Outside the wind walked down the centre of the street. He glanced out and saw the dust riffling and stirring, wiping away his footprints.  
  
When he stepped outside again, bags in his arms, the wind stopped as though he had caught it unawares, and the street was wrapped in a hushed silence.  
  
And with the silence fallen around him, there were only his own thoughts for company as he made his way back towards where he had left Hakuryuu and the others. Even his catfooted pace was audible as he walked down the empty street.  
  
Step. Step.  
  
He'd been alone then too.  
  
Step.  
  
But he'd known he'd find her.  
  
Step.  
  
It would have been wrong to say that it was because of her, or because he loved her, or because he could not live without her. It simply was. The knife had been part of him. It hadn't even been the berserker rage which he had read about (you read so much, Gonou) and there had not been any merciful blindness, any red haze, any driving fury which went beyond his body and moved him like a puppet.  
  
Step.  
  
The wind had started again. It ruffled his hair and flicked at the fringes of his sash. It smelt of sand and salt and iron.  
  
Step.  
  
Anger had risen in him and flowed through him as though it was as simple a thing as blood, as necessary a thing as breath. They were his enemy. He had killed them.  
  
Step.  
  
And she had said _I bear the monster's child_. And then the quick movement of the knife. Had the blade dulled when he used it on others? Had he had that precision of stroke, that economy of motion? How alike were their hands?  
  
Step.  
  
He needed someone to talk to. He needed someone else. He needed someone so that he could be Cho Hakkai, because Cho Hakkai had friends, had companions, had people who needed him, and all his steps were turning inwards to that quiet place where she was curled silent and unspeaking, and his own voice screamed blame louder than any accusation from man or youkai or god.  
  
Step.  
  
The smell of blood wasn't coming from the wind. It was coming from him. He let the bags fall from his hands to look at them, but they were clean, pale things, long-fingered and delicate, hardly the sort of hands to kill babies in cradles or run a knife through a pregnant woman's throat, hardly that at all, such gentle hands, such delicate hands.   
  
And still, the scent of blood.  
  
Step.   
  
Motion was a habit, continued without thinking, because to stop would have required conscious thought, and all his focus was on the past now. And if he stopped, if he thought of something else, if he broke free of the pattern, then he would have to face the weight of it again and take it on his shoulders, and surely that would kill him, choke him with remembered tears and blood.  
  
Step.  
  
The wind blew dust around his feet.   
  
Step.   
  
Shadows reared above his head as though he was walking down a corridor. Shafts of light between the buildings flickered like torches.  
  
_I have always been waiting for you_, it said. _You knew that you could never leave. No matter what promises were made, what absolution was given, what judgement was pronounced, you knew that this place would always be here._  
  
Step.  
  
_I do not promise you surcease from sorrow_, it said. _I do not promise you release. I do not promise you peace. I do not promise you joy._  
  
Step.  
  
_I only promise you this: that you will live in the moment forever and that it will never change. You will have despair and you will desire nothing else. You will see her before you and you will always know that you were too late. The moment will go on forever. You will not die. You will not change. You will see her and her dead eyes will look at you and there will always be that momentary wonder as to why she smiled while the water ran from the corners of her eyes and traced lines through the dust and dirt which streaked her face. You will see the blood on her hands and dress from when she embraced you through the bars. You will never have to leave the despair and know what happens next._  
  
The darkness rose before him in long bars. A shadow lay behind them, a broken flower in a pool of blood.  
  
Step.  
  
_And you could turn away, you could always turn away. I will not compel you. I do not lie to you. I am your voice which speaks to you in the silence of your own mind. Surely I am not unkind. Surely this is all that you will ever desire. I am the only perfection. I shall hold death's hand away from you, so that you may see this forever._  
  
Hakkai knelt down like an old man, and looked through the bars at where Kanan lay in the pool of blood.  
  
_I am the dry river and I have no need for lies, for this is unchanging truth and this is despair._  
  
In the street, the dust began to cover up his footprints.  
  
---

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	3. Chapter Three

Chapter Three   
  
And if Hakkai was taking his time, that didn't necessarily mean anything, Gojyo reminded himself as he paced down the street, a thin whipping snatch of wind blowing at his trousers and ruffling his hair. And if he was being a little longer with the shopping than expected, perhaps that only meant that he'd found somewhere that sold cigarettes in this godforsaken dump of a dried-up town. And if Hakuryuu was sitting there quietly in his jeep form and wouldn't reply to anything he said to the little dragon, then that was probably a good thing too. Yeah. Sure.  
  
And if Sanzou had told him to go out and find Hakkai himself if he was so damn worried about him, then that was Sanzou being Sanzou being a tight-assed bastard of a monk.  
  
And if Goku wanted to stay and stare at Sanzou, or argue with him, or do whatever, then that was what Goku was going to do.  
  
And it was damn quiet out here.  
  
Gojyo clenched his fists, then carefully rejected the thought of summoning his weapon. There was nothing out here to be frightened of, after all. There literally wasn't anything to attack him, anybody to threaten him.  
  
If only he could find Hakkai and be reassured that there really was nothing wrong.  
  
Nothing grew here. Dust choked the dried remnants of weeds and sand lay thick around the roots of dried trees that curled in on themselves, senescent and hollow, without even the grace to rot properly and give something back to the earth. This whole town felt that way. If he prodded the houses around him, they'd fall over like a pack of cards.  
  
And the worst of it all was, Gojyo tried not to recognise, was you began to feel that way yourself here. Swagger drained away and confidence trickled out and was lost. You started to feel like an empty shell . . .  
  
He raised one hand to touch his hair. _Blood_, Hakkai had said. The crimson of his hair, his halfbreed hair, had been enough to hold Hakkai in the present, or Gonou as he'd been then, though it had been a while before he even knew the stranger's name. It had kept him alive. That had made it worth something.  
  
There were no children here. Why?  
  
His feet crunched in the sand of the street. The route he'd taken should have brought him round in a circle back to the inn, but the houses around him were unfamiliar.  
  
That settled it. This wasn't just his imagination. It rarely was, after all. The others were the ones who had overactive imaginations, long periods of brooding, and conspiracy theories about mysterious manipulators and dark conspiracies and dubious Bodhisattvas. He was the practical one, the down-to-earth one. If he thought there was some weird shit going on here, then there was.  
  
_Yet all this time, she cries for her child._  
  
Gojyo straightened, falling automatically into combat readiness as the shadow of a voice brushed the back of his mind, not quite heard, barely comprehended.  
  
_For her child._  
  
He remembered the smell of wayside flowers. They couldn't grow here, of course. Nothing grew here. No children, either. Nobody to run out by the side of the road and come back with their hands full of flowers and their knees streaked green from the grass and . . .  
  
"What is this shit?" he said aloud.  
  
There had to be someone in all these houses. He'd have an answer if he had to shake it out of them. He was Gojyo, dammit, Sa Gojyo, big man, adult, able to take care of himself. He didn't need this shit. He was over it. It was gone, right? It was done with, right?  
  
Gojyo realised that he had been speaking aloud for several minutes, and that his voice hung in the air like the sound of a dull bell, echoing and humming in the stillness.  
  
Jien had put an end to that with his sword. He'd cut away any possibility of it going on, set Gojyo free from both his mother and himself.  
  
With a sudden spurt of movement, trying to seize control of the situation again, Gojyo stalked across to a randomly chosen door, and beat against it with his right hand. "Hey! Open up in there, you! Open up!"  
  
Muffled noises drifted through the door, as dim and vague as the voice of a forgotten lover heard in dreams.  
  
_you're my precious you're the only one I love_  
  
_but you know she'll never say that_  
  
"Let me in," he whispered.  
  
The door opened.  
  
The flowers lay scattered on the floor, stems uneven and ragged as they had been when he picked them, leaves crushed from when he'd held onto them desperately tight. It had been a sudden swooping decision, a great feeling of rightness, as he'd pulled them from where they grew and gone running home with them. It had been so absolutely the perfect moment as he ran down the path with loose petals falling by the wayside, knowing that he was taking them home for his mother.  
  
_Didn't you want to be her child? Her child, her true child, the one she would have looked at the way she looked at Jien, the one she would have smiled at, have held close, have petted and told how good you were when you brought her flowers . . ._  
  
And some part of Gojyo's mind still tried to say, _this is weird shit, get out now_, but the rest of his thoughts said, _yes, yes, I did, I wanted that, I still want that._  
  
_I know you do,_ the voice whispered, moving through him like the desert wind, as though he was a ghost stepped back from the future to walk in a past that had become present.  
  
He knew what the sounds coming from the inner room were. He remembered hearing them. He still heard them sometimes in dreams.  
  
_Here you'll never have her. But here you'll never lose her._  
  
"Stop it," Gojyo whispered, and his voice cracked like a child's.  
  
_This is the worst thing in the world. It's what you want. Don't stop listening. Don't look away. Simply exist. This is where you are punished for existing, taboo child. This is where the pain starts._  
  
_Because even through what she's saying, what she's gasping, you can still hear her crying, can't you?_  
  
---  
  
The dry river is patient. The dry river offers what you have always wanted. It knows that in time you will accept the worst thing in the world and hold on to it.  
  
The dry river does not listen to people who claim otherwise.  
  
It knows what's best for you.  
  
It keeps the little rooms all ready and swept and garnished, waiting for you to step back into your past, so that you will have no excuse to leave it. It polishes the stones on mountain peaks and it washes the monastery walls with rain and it lights the torches in the dungeons so that you will have no cause to complain.  
  
The dry river wants you to stay. And never die.  
  
---

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	4. Chapter Four

Chapter Four   
  
_And if this should be unchanging eternity, then at least it is quiet, and free from the interruptions of morons, and the confusion of innocents, and the complications of daily existence, and the sins of the helpless guilty who cry out that it wasn't their fault, that it was for someone else, and that they aren't to blame. Though then who is?_  
  
The smoke from Sanzou's cigarette climbed like a spiralling ladder to Heaven.   
  
Not that he believed in Heaven. Or perhaps, rather, he considered with the lazy detachment of solitude which does not expect to be disturbed for a while, that Heaven was only a place, just like any city on Earth, and that the people there would be just as persistently annoying as they were down here. Not to mention pervert hermaphrodites who would doubtless seize the occasion to be exceptionally frustrating.   
  
_This is the end of all roads, the silence which waits for all human beings, the mercy which is no mercy at all, but which is all you will receive._  
  
Mercy was a curious concept, and probably something that it was better to leave to people who actually knew something about it.   
  
Dust hissed against the window as the wind rose outside. It sounded like rain. The lights dimmed with it, as the blowing sand cut off the sun in whispering rasps and rattles against the glass.   
  
Sanzou took another drag from his cigarette. For the first time in a while, he wondered if his master would have approved of the habit. Or of his drinking. Or of the corpses strewn behind him in a scattering of exorcised powder.   
  
He could have raised one finger to brush it against the sutra, but he didn't. That would have been weakness, and Koumyou Sanzou's last words had been about the precise opposite of weakness. Be strong.   
  
_Karma brings us to our appointed ends. We follow the roads laid out for us. Each drop of blood, each shed tear . . ._  
  
Did I cry, he wondered.   
  
He couldn't remember.   
  
_. . . builds the next step of our carefully calculated path to damnation and endings and finality. We stop moving and do not go any further. In that we find all the punishment we were expecting, all the enlightenment that we will ever need._  
  
His fingers tightened on the cigarette butt. Sanzou. Sanzou hoshi-sama. Master of the Law. Enlightened priest. Teacher. Such petty, useless, worthless words.   
  
_Open up your mind._  
  
It was dark now.   
  
_You know where you are._  
  
Rushing sand outside like a river of rain, pattering endlessly against ground and walls, the sounds constant and heartless, like a message which he would never understand.   
  
_Now and forever . . ._  
  
He broke its hold. It was as instantaneous and spontaneous as that, the equivalent of a curse flung in the face of despair, a moment of light which existed in spite of the darkness, as much as the darkness. There was no forever. Nothing was forever. And if God did not save, neither did he damn. And all of this was such a load of complete and utter **shit** that it wasn't worth listening to any longer. He wasn't in the habit of walking into traps, other than to spring them, and he wasn't going to dance on anyone's strings for their pleasure, and despair was a waste of time and effort.   
  
No wonder the other two morons had never come back from their little strolls outside.   
  
Sanzou ground out the cigarette butt and stood up. "I don't know who you are," he said aloud, "but I know what you are. This stops here."   
  
---

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	5. Chapter Five

Chapter Five   
  
Goku shook himself awake from the half-daze which hung in the air, and listened to Sanzou questioning the innkeeper. The monk's words to the air had broken the room's peace, which was probably a good thing -- or was it? The silence had been strangely familiar, and he had almost wanted to shut his eyes, look away from Sanzou, and listen to it further, as if there was something hidden at the centre of it like a pearl, like a treasure in the middle of a ball of snow -- and now he had to listen to Sanzou. Because Sanzou was Sanzou.  
  
"I don't understand," the innkeeper said, his voice as distracted as his eyes. Pale grey hair, neither silver nor dark, hung lankly down to his shoulders. One hand played with the edge of his apron.  
  
"What's going on." There was an edge to Sanzou's voice, the genuine temper that was more dangerous than any snapping or shouting or blows from fans, and he was no longer bothering to pretend that the question could go unanswered. "That's what I'm asking."   
  
"I. Oh." The innkeeper let the apron edge slither between his fingers. "Something. I don't know. Some of the other people aren't around any more, have you noticed?" he added softly, as though confiding a secret. "If you pay too much attention to it, you go away to be with it."  
  
"What is it?" Goku interrupted, moving to Sanzou's side.  
  
"It . . ." He shook his head vaguely. "It's washing us all away. The walls keep on changing. Did you pay me? I thought that I had guests." There was a blankness in his eyes, now, as he looked at them. "It comes in when you think. You wade down into it and you drown in it."  
  
Sanzou made an irritated noise deep in his throat, then turned around and stalked towards the door. The sleeves of his robes fluttered in the wind of his passage, the only movement in that room.  
  
"I think I had a daughter," the innkeeper said softly, as Goku followed Sanzou hesitatingly. "A daughter and a son. I had children. They went down to the stream."  
  
Sanzou turned, but the innkeeper was fading like a shape of dust, eyes clear at last, but fixed on something else. "They went down to the stream," he whispered, and was gone.  
  
Silence hung in the room, and nothing moved.  
  
"Sanzou." Goku's voice was raw and harsh in the stillness. "Sanzou, what is it? What's happening here?"  
  
"Morons." Sanzou hauled the door open brusquely, and dust came scattering in from the night outside. "Morons making fools of themselves. Idiots getting trapped in their own despair. Come on. We need to find the stream."  
  
And Goku followed. He would always follow. This was his present. That was all there was. There was no need for hope or despair.  
  
---  
  
The push of wind was heavy enough to hinder Sanzou, tangling his robes around his legs and spraying sand and grit into his face. _Thank you very much for making it clear which direction you don't want me to go in, you bastard_, he thought dryly as he covered his face with his sleeve. _Thank you for being stupid._ Anger pushed him onwards -- a curious, dry, dispassionate anger which was not quite like his normal sulphurous temper, the fury which constantly seethed in him at the stupidity of the world. He was used to morons being morons. He knew the taste of that bitterness. He had met enough evil and perversion to be accustomed to what one might call a natural anger and abhorrence of such a thing, one easily answered with a bullet or a blade or a sutra. But this despair which ran like a scar through the village and buried people under its weight when their only crime was stupidity . . . that annoyed him in what he could only term a moral sense.  
  
It might have had something to do with memories of Koumyou Sanzou and an orange aeroplane falling into the endless depth of clear blue sky, something to do with that sudden perception of free flight and possibility. Maybe. He'd think about it later. Next time it rained.  
  
Besides, it had tried to manipulate him. Nothing and nobody got away with that.  
  
Perhaps it was a little risky to assume that the innkeeper's last words had been a direct clue to the riddle, but something in them had rung precise and true, had been a desperate attempt to reach him, a grasp at clarity before the sand and the wind caught the man and took him away to wherever it kept its captives.  
  
"That way!" Goku yelled through the hissing of dust, pulling at Sanzou's free sleeve. He pointed to the left, seemingly at random. "The stream's that way! I can smell water!"  
  
Good. And better that the bakazaru concentrate on something like that, rather than on . . . on anything else that might come to mind.  
  
Abruptly the wind lessened and fell, leaving them alone in the desert night. The sound of water rose to fill the silence, chanting and gurgling in the quick gentle way that could be a voice if you were trying to hear one.  
  
It was too easy. Sanzou brushed sand from his hair as he walked to the edge of the ridge that they were standing on, and looked down.  
  
In the small valley below, it was late afternoon. Sunlight somehow fell fierce and pitiless on the two figures there, while he stood in the same darkness that he had been walking through for the last half hour. The water ran bright and cheerful, sparkling and clean, and stained the dry rock dark in a wide sweep leading to where the girl knelt with her arms about the motionless boy. She barely moved, but her hands clenched and unclenched rhythmically around the boy's shoulders.  
  
_How like her father._  
  
The boy lay there, dark brown hair soddenly plastered back from his face, eyes open and still as pebbles.  
  
The sun shone, the water ran, and the silence in the air was no silence at all but a shriek of pain. It curved like a rainbow to fall into despair, and sang there where nothing moved and nothing heard and nothing answered.  
  
It was a challenge, an answer to Sanzou's own words. He felt the pulse of the thing in the air.  
  
_This is what she wants. Are you her judge, to take it away from her? Are you the Master of the Law, to ordain her life, to give her enlightenment? Are you any sort of connection to her, that you should want to interfere? What gives you the right to come between us, when she calls out to me with every breath?_  
  
_I am kindness. I answer her._  
  
In the night, in the silence, dust sifted like rain.  
  
---

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	6. Chapter Six

Chapter Six   
  
"She's hurting," Goku said.  
  
Sanzou turned to look at him, surprised at the interruption.  
  
Goku's eyes, luminous gold in the darkness, were troubled. "She's hurting, Sanzou. She's trapped too. Look at her. She's just . . ."  
  
_Just a child_, hung in the air between them. And Goku was just a child, too, and Sanzou had been just a child when the claws opened up the night for him, and, and, and. And they had all been children once. That meant nothing. She was the challenge which had been thrown in his face. She must be the key which kept the despair tethered here like some dark scapegoat.  
  
The scene was easy enough to read. The boy had died, the girl mourned him. Had it been some childish squabble, some mock-fight which had turned abruptly lethal? Had they simply been playing? Had she wandered upstream for a moment and turned her back on him, and returned to find him lying face down in the water, eyes blank pebbles washed by the flowing stream? Had she pounded his back when she pulled him out, desperate to force water out and air in, or put her lips to his and tried to make him breathe by main force?  
  
_What right have you to dispute her guilt?_ The presence had returned, if indeed it had ever left. It trembled in the night air and hushed the wind for a moment. Sanzou suspected that if he looked behind him -- and for a moment it was tempting to do so, but he feared he might never again find the stream if he did -- that his footprints would have filled up with sand and brushed into nothingness.  
  
"If she has the right to do as she wishes," Sanzou gritted, "then I have the right to do as I wish."  
  
Silence disputed this.  
  
He took a step towards the streambed. The space between himself and Goku abruptly elongated, as though a single pace was a matter of miles. He heard Goku's cry of anger through the sudden hissing of sand.  
  
_Then go alone,_ it whispered. _God saves nobody. You must save yourself._  
  
"Goku!" he called at the top of his voice. "Bakazaru! Keep on talking to me!" It was illusion, it was all illusion here, time and space and reality and life and death, and the only cord which he had left to hold on to while he fished for this girl's soul was Goku's presence, Goku's voice, Goku's need of him.  
  
---  
  
Goku could barely hear his own voice over the rising silence which flooded around him like water. Silence should not have been louder than a voice, or more resounding than bells. The air smelt like snow, sharp and clear.  
  
He knew what to do. This wasn't forever, because there _was_ a next and there _would be_ a next. Brightness coalesced from the air, the white glow of sunlight on snow, and the cold bit at his skin. He knew what he had to do now, he knew what happened, and in a way it had always happened and would always happen and would always be happening, he would always be crying out in need and desperation and love, and he would always be answered.  
  
"Sanzou!" _Sanzou Sanzou Sanzou_  
  
---  
  
"What am I supposed to say to you?" He sat down. The shadows and the sunlight still delineated a neat line between them. "I don't know what happened."  
  
_Sanzou Sanzou Sanzou._ Goku's voice beat against his ears in a ghostly whisper. _Sanzou Sanzou Sanzou._  
  
"I'm not your judge."  
  
_Sanzou_  
  
"Nobody sent me here to save you."  
  
_Sanzou_  
  
"I could tell you to let my friends go, but you wouldn't listen, would you? No. I didn't think so. If you would have let go for anyone, you'd have let go for your father, or for your village, or for someone else you cared about."  
  
_Sanzou_  
  
"You're going to have to let go for yourself."  
  
_Sanzou_  
  
The rustling of the sand behind him was like rain. He knew, with the calm certainty of nightmares, what he would see if he chose to look behind him. He chose not to.  
  
"I am not here to forgive you. If you killed him, then by all means suffer for it."  
  
_Sanzou_  
  
For the first time, she seemed to perceive his presence. She didn't look up at him, or cease the endless clutching of her fingers on the boy's clothing, but there was a new prickle to the air, a sense of acknowledgement. _You grieve too_, it seemed to say. _We have both sinned. We are both sinners._  
  
---  
  
In the darkness, Cho Gonou knelt and looked at Kanan's body, and marvelled at the untouched lines of her fingers, pale against the dark stone of the floor, and remembered each time that they had touched each other in bed, remembered the tangled sheets and the smell of sweat and sex, the smell of her tangled hair as he buried his face in it. And all that time we never thought of ourselves as sinners or dreamed of punishment. How strange to think that there could have been a time before.  
  
How strange. Something at the back of his mind struggled to form itself into coherent thought. How strange to think that there could be a time after.  
  
---  
  
"Death is final." He found a cigarette, and lit it, cupping his hand against the gusts of wind. It glowed like blood in the night which still wrapped around him. "If we come again, we don't know it, we will never know it. You won't see your brother again, girl. He's dead, you're alive. Even if there is rebirth, you will not know who you once were, and neither will he."  
  
_Sanzou_  
  
"So don't expect any platitudes from me."  
  
_Sanzou_  
  
"People kill other people. Sometimes it's deliberate. Sometimes it's not. The only thing that I know about it is that people who kill must also be prepared to be killed."  
  
_Sanzou_  
  
Yes. It was the same guilt for her as for him. He could taste it, just as he could feel the shape of his own guilt and despair forming behind him. Not that they had killed, but that they could not save, and either way so utterly guilty of the other person's blood.  
  
---  
  
Scarlet flowers like blood, thought Sha Gojyo, like his hair, like his eyes, like all the colours of his life, like the blood which ran across the floor in a slow accusing line which pointed directly at him, coming from Jien's sword through her body in a river which would never end. A mark on his life forever, a brand. The colour of pain.  
  
But there was more blood than hers. Echoes of other voices were clearer, and broke through the constant murmurs for a moment. There had been at least one moment when his hair and eyes had meant something else to someone else, and that was a thought which was free of this place.  
  
---  
  
"So." He pulled his gun out of his sleeve.  
  
_Sanzou_  
  
"You are guilty of your brother's death. I won't argue this with you."  
  
_Sanzou_  
  
"If you truly want to find him again, then take this and pull the trigger. You won't know him. He won't know you. Neither of you will ever had what you once had. But then again, you don't have it now." His voice was sharp, and he closed his eyes, hearing the stream before him, the sand behind him like rain, and always, always Goku's voice, to remind him of the things he needed to remember. "You're holding a piece of meat in your arms. Despair will not be your brother and it will not be my master. What you have now is choice. If you truly think you deserve death, then kill yourself."  
  
He opened his eyes, and threw the gun forward. It fell from shadow to sunlight, the light gleaming like gold on it. It clattered down the rocks to land near her.  
  
"Or, if not . . ."  
  
And she opened her eyes.  
  
"Live."  
  
The darkness and storm closed round him, tearing at his robes and hair, trying to pull the sutra from around his neck. He held onto the narrow strip of paper as if it was a lifeline, covering his face with his sleeves. The wind screamed at him with his own voice, the child's voice crying _why did you live when he died?_ and _what reason have you to go on from day to day?_ and just _make it stop_.  
  
_Sanzou_, came the different voice, the other voice, the one that would not stop calling to him.  
  
"Bakazaru!" he shouted. "Where are you?"  
  
---  
  
And Goku reached through the wind and storm and snow and silence and all the folds of despair, and took his hand.  
  
---  
  
The morning air was cold and dry, not yet heated by the rising sun which turned the dawn bloody. They were sprawled in the sand and dust. Hakuryuu's voice woke them, a soft note lacking his normal cheer. Hakkai reached up for him with the easy motion of habit, and the white dragon settled on his shoulder gently, bending its head to nestle into the hollow of his neck.  
  
Sanzou withdrew his hand from Goku's grasp. There was no gentleness to the motion, no affection, no confiding grasp; it was a casual thing, an action practiced a thousand times, just as many times as it took to take the other's hand in the first place.  
  
Gojyo coughed, and spat. "Nothing here but dust."  
  
"Nothing here but dust for a long time," Hakkai agreed quietly.  
  
"Sanzou." Goku's head was lowered, but his shoulders were tense with resolve. "Did she shoot herself? Did she take the gun?"  
  
Sanzou withdrew the gun from his sleeve. "I still have it."  
  
"But . . ."  
  
"Shut up." Sanzou's eyes were more withdrawn than usual. "We need to get moving."  
  
"But Sanzou . . ."  
  
"Bakazaru," Sanzou muttered. "It doesn't matter whether she did or not. The point is that she made a choice whether or not to do it." He started to walk westwards, apparently not interested in riding in the jeep for the moment.  
  
"That simple?" Gojyo asked. His eyes were lowered as he began to follow Sanzou, focused on the lighting of the morning's first cigarette, and his hanging hair concealed his face.  
  
"Simple enough to save her," Sanzou replied.  
  
As they travelled, the sun rose above them in a cloudless sky.  
  
---

Fanfic Page 


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